


Fish

by Geronimo_Jay



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood, Children, Daughters, Fish out of Water, Gen, Original Fiction, Original Universe, flying fish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 09:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1382521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geronimo_Jay/pseuds/Geronimo_Jay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I had a dream last night, where I was visiting a different world.” </p><p>“One like ours?” I asked.</p><p>“Yes. One exactly like ours, but with only one exception: there were no fish in the sky.” This was hard to imagine. At the age of five, I couldn't once remember a time when I hadn't woken up to the soft language of whales above our small home, or have my nose nibbled on by some small fish swimming in morning fog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fish

One day when I was five, my father gave me an intriguing piece of advice. It was just like any other weekend, I suppose, when we decided to go and visit my aunt in a small town called Lincliff, which is just a few miles from the city of Valmoor. 

Now, there is only one passenger train running in and out of Merrimarsh, and we don’t have a car, so the journey started around five in the morning so we could walk into town. We had to stop and pick up a bag of my aunt’s favorite sweats from the market district. The candy buns where a home-made concoction of Merrimarsh’s only baker, and you couldn’t find them anywhere else in the world. After that we were able to catch the seven-thirty sharp train into Valmoor. (Not a single train runs into Lincliff, the land isn’t sturdy enough.) And, just as if this where an every-day routine, I looked out of the car window, up into the sky, and watched the bellies of gigantic swimming whales passing high above the valleys. After one particularly large pod swam above, my father looked at me and said:

“Gretchen, you should always be mindful of the things around you. Because, one day, those fish might not be here anymore.” He said this so suddenly and out of nowhere, that I was confused. I swiped a stray piece of dark hair from in front of my face and shifted in my seat to better face him. 

“I had a dream last night, where I was visiting a different world.” 

“One like ours?” I asked.

“Yes. One exactly like ours, but with only one exception: there were no fish in the sky.” This was hard to imagine. At the age of five, I couldn’t once remember a time when I hadn’t woken up to the soft language of whales above our small home, or have my nose nibbled on by some small fish swimming in morning fog. 

“Why where there no fish?” 

“Because the people drove them out.” He replied. “There were no fish anywhere in their world, because they had all been poisoned. Or their places destroyed. And the only living fish left, where stuffed into boxes where people would come just to watch, and point.”

“Why would someone do that?”

To which he answered, “Some people are very greedy. And sometimes they do not care about anything other than their greed. Greed is, in fact a green monster that will eat you alive from the inside-out.” This, again, was hard for me to understand. But at the moment, I could not think of green monsters. We had started seeing more trees then rolling hills,  
and as the trees got thicker, I could only think one thing: sharks.

Sharks where defiantly my favorite of all the fish that swam. I had only seen them once before, on a trip to my aunt’s wedding. When the train was still new, and my mom was still alive. I was three, and they were fascinating. My mom had found my fascination with the sharks in the forest so enduring that, upon our arrival to Valmoor, she had convinced my father to buy me a book about sharks. I had spent all of the visit with my aunt talking about the sharks in my new book, and by the time I could actually read the book, my parents had read it to me so many times that I could recite it.

When we saw the first shark, I started telling my father all about the Whitetip sharks that swam in this particular forest, and about their special relationship with the black-and-white striped Pilot fish, which they didn’t eat because they had something called a mu-tu-al-ist-ic relationship. Which means that both the shark and the fish got something from it. 

I still remember my dad asking what exactly did they get out of the deal, but I didn’t know, so I guessed.

“Good company?”

My father laughed, but I didn’t understand what was so funny about it. But then I thought of something.

“Papa, did they drive out the sharks too? And the Pilot fish?”

“They did. And all of the minnows and suckers and jellies.” 

“That’s sad.” I said, even though I didn’t like jellies. They were pretty, but they sting, and don’t swim; just float. “Why did they do it?”

“Because they were greedy. I already told you.”

“Yes, but why were they greedy?”

“I don’t know.”

 

When we arrived in Valmoor, I watched the jellies that floated among the city buildings. Dad said that at night the city was lit up like day time, only not, because the jellies had something called bi-o-lu-mi-nes-cence, which made them glow brightly. 

When I was here last, a small jelly floated right next to me. I had seen just as many jellies as I had seen Sharks, and my mom thought that maybe she would get me a book on jelly-fish too. But then I touched the floating fish and it stung me. It left a bright red whelp right on my hand, and I didn’t want anything to do with them anymore. Turns out you have to touch the tops. 

Now, my dad is looking for cars to take us to Lincliff. The city is large, and I’m aloud to look at the shop next to the post, where my dad is conversing about transportation. The shop is filled with things like books and dolls and puzzles, and when my father had come to retrieve me, I had spent all but a quarter of my allowance on a beautiful map of the world, with paintings of the fish that lived in certain areas. Including the whales above Merrimarsh. 

My father and I ate a late lunch on the back of a goods truck. It was a bowl of something like spiced green noodles with ham and vegetables in broth. The restaurant we got the food from was from a place that ate its food with sticks. When I asked, the woman pointed to my map which had a picture of a small-ish fish that was brown with small black spots all over. I couldn’t pronounce the name of the fish. It was hard to use sticks to eat soup, but just when we finished, we were high enough to see the far-off sting-rays, which you  
can’t see from my aunt’s place. 

The truck only went so far as the Lincliff post and trade building. We thanked the driver and walked the road up to the small city, after I used the rest of my money on a long sturdy string and a cup of worms that lived at the bottom of the trenches at the post. I was left with two coppers, and I thought I might give them to Clara, my cozen, for her birthday. 

That was why we were visiting my aunt. She had just had her first child two or three weeks before. We would have come sooner, but the flowers had just started growing in Merrimarsh, and I became sick with allergies. When we arrived at my aunt’s place, she was excited to see us, but Clara was napping, and my uncle was fixing a fence for his goats,  
so my grandmother (whom lived with my aunt) suggested I feed the coy, and my father said if I could remember the way, I could go. 

Coy are beautiful fish that swim in the trenches of the Lincliff mountains. They are white and orange and some almost as big as the whales. All you had to do was tie the end of a long sturdy string to a strong stick (I was using a shrub branch) and make a loop-knot on the other end to hold a worm. Then you through the worm end into the trench, and after a few minutes, a coy fish might take the treat. 

My mom and aunt sat with me the day before my aunt’s wedding when I was three, and we fed coy for hours. But now it was just me on the dock. Sometimes, a fish might nibble my toes, because I had taken off my shoes, and by the time the worms in my cup where all gone, it was time to go back to my aunts place.

 

In the years that fallow, I see my aunt and cozen often. As I get older, I’m aloud to travel by myself to spend the day, or night with my only living family.  
Of course, I am an old woman now, a-hundred and one, and things are so vary different than when I was five. 

When I was thirteen, the companies my father sold his produce to got bigger and started buying better crops from other farmers. Our neighbors were all using a new fertilizer that made their crops grow bigger. My father needed the money. The taxes on our land had gone up. He used the fertilizer, but it killed all the fish. The small ones that nibbled my nose in the early morning fog. The fish would eat the bugs that would eat the plants. But the bugs had eaten the plants, which had grown in the fertilizer. And the fish died. I would find them on the ground around the fields, and when I did, I cried. I cried for days and locked myself in my room until I was sick of dehydration. Papa stopped using the fertilizer, but the damage was done. The fish stopped swimming at our home. Marguerite, Carlton, and Wade from school said the fish sopped coming to their homes too.  
When I was 37, my father died. His heart just stopped one day. My husband, Leland, and I inherited the farm and moved there with our sons, Jacob and Nelson. The first year we were there, that was the year the whales stopped coming. One day, a bunch of men came. The sight was horrible. They had roped off a baby and was dragging it from its mother. My boys where so young. I wouldn’t let them watch. They were locked in their room until the crime was done. The men had pulled the baby away and had stunned the mother to keep her from fighting back against them. When she woke up, she cried. 

I had thought the act was bad. But the crying was worse. It went for days and days, and it wasn’t just the mother. Her entire pod was crying. It was just worse for her. It was her baby. I couldn’t imagine, didn’t understand why anyone would do such a thing as take a child from its mother. I cried as long as they did, and kept my own children close to me. When the whale pod left, they were back within the week. And again the next week, and again and again for an entire year. She was looking for her baby, I could tell. Then one day she just stopped. She never did come back. Nor her pod, or any other pod. It was odd and lonely without their soft language above our little home. 

One day when my boys where a few years older, they asked if we all could go and see Ostia, the preforming whale. When I saw the card, I recognized the baby on the front, and tore up the paper. The boys didn’t remember the incident, and they didn’t understand. We never went to see Ostia. I learned a year after that Ostia had died. 

 

When I was seventy-two I wrote to Clara. We wrote to each other before that, of course, and we talked about a lot of things. Mostly our grand-children. Her oldest grand-daughter had called her an old fart one time, and we discussed how if that had been either of us to our grand-mother, my dad or aunt would have smacked us across the rear and sent us to  
bed with-out supper for such disrespect. But not my second cozen. She had, apparently laughed, but just told her daughter not to say such things, as if it where funny.

I asked Clara, in one of my letters, whether or not she remembered the fish. Did she remember the coy that swam in the mountain trenches? Or the jellies in Valmoor? She didn’t remember the jellies well. They had been poisoned when she was young. Valmoor’s ever-growing city had poisoned the air, and all the jellies got sick and died. I never really liked the jellies, but it was sad that they were gone now. 

She did remember the coy. Lincliff was small. The mayor thought they could bring in more cash, if they invited people to see the beautiful fish. No-one thought twice about it. They had all admired the fish for so many years, it would be selfish to not share their beauty with the world. They sent out advertisements, and invitations, “COME SEE THE BEAUTIFUL COY OF LINCLIFF!” and the people came. They had tours. The people would come and take pictures with new cameras. Flashes shocked the coy, and they would stop swimming, stunned for a moment. The people would also touch the sides of the trenches. The oils and dirt from grime covered hands would kill the bugs and smaller fish. And with no bugs or smaller fish, the coy started disappearing. 

She asked me in a letter back, if I remember the last time we fed the coy together? I did. When I was ten, but before she was five, and our grandmother died. We had gone to stay with my aunt for the funeral. Clara says that she hasn’t seen coy any in ages. Her grand-children don’t believe her that they were there at all. My grand-children don’t believe me either.

The forest isn’t there anymore. And there are no-more sharks. Instead there is a factory. It cuts stone for walkways, I think. The trees are all gone, used to make houses or boats or kindling. The train still runs through where the forest used to be, only now there is a gigantic gray building that shoots smoke into the air, and pumps out cut-stones for walkways. When I turned ninety-three, I gave up trying to see more sharks. It was clear that they were gone. 

I was a-hundred and one and nine months when it happened. I went to bed, alone like the past ten years, and woke up five-years-old. And when my feet touched the ground, the wood was warm and comfortable. And some one was calling to me from outside. I ran bare-footed out the door, and found my father waiting with his hand stretched out. We didn’t have a car, and our day started in the early morning, so we could walk into town. And when we got there, the train was waiting. It was new as it was when I was little, and just as fast. And when we started to go, I pressed my nose against the window and looked at the sky. And there was a particularly large pod of whales above. I could see their bellies. And there was a mother, too. She was with her baby. And as the train continued down the tracks, the rolling hills of the valley shifted into a thickening forest. And when I saw the first shark, my father said to me, “Did you ever learn why people where greedy?”

I thought for a long moment.

“No, papa. I could never figure it out.”

“Me either.” He sighed. It was quiet, then the train stopped, and as we stood, my father asked: 

“Gretchen, do you remember why Whitetip sharks swim with Pilot fish?”

“No. why?”

“Because they are good company.”

The doors opened, and there was my mother. Behind her was Leland, and my aunt, and young Clara.  
And Sharks swam among the trees, and farther on, jellies swam in an open field. And up the side of a mountain was a trench, and it was full of coy.

**Author's Note:**

> if you have an idea for a title, I would be excited to hear it! send me a message here or on Tumblr. (also there is art to go with the story. that's on Tumblr too ) 
> 
> ( http://shortstoriyplace.tumblr.com/ )


End file.
